I don’t quite understand what you mean in that first paragraph. Are you talking about people who justify clearly bad behavior with religion? Or the opposite, people who are uncertain about good behavior because it contradicts their religion? Or both at the same time, people who give up trying to define good and bad and just do whatever, because God will forgive them anyway?
I worry about being good though, not for spiritual reasons, but because the world is created by the tiny choices we make each day and I worry about making the world worse out of complacency.
I mean people who adopt dogmatic belief systems because they cannot decide or discern for themselves what “good” is or they worry so much about the possibility of an afterlife and judgement for things they might have done that they pick a belief system to guide them.
I don’t understand that, I don’t get being so unable to determine what’s good or not that you start walking on very narrow rails and handing over accountability to some higher power or some old book or scrolls written by other people who are equally clueless. I’m not saying it makes someone “bad” to become spiritual or religious or finding God or something, I’m just saying it’s completely alien to me, I cannot fathom making the series of choices to get to that point.
I find that our capability to think about our actions, our impact on others, our choices and decisions from within, our capacity to reframe and understand our choices, that’s about the only spark of free-will that may be real. It’s a kind of suicide to hand over that one, tiny thing we actually have.
I don’t quite understand what you mean in that first paragraph. Are you talking about people who justify clearly bad behavior with religion? Or the opposite, people who are uncertain about good behavior because it contradicts their religion? Or both at the same time, people who give up trying to define good and bad and just do whatever, because God will forgive them anyway?
I worry about being good though, not for spiritual reasons, but because the world is created by the tiny choices we make each day and I worry about making the world worse out of complacency.
I mean people who adopt dogmatic belief systems because they cannot decide or discern for themselves what “good” is or they worry so much about the possibility of an afterlife and judgement for things they might have done that they pick a belief system to guide them.
I don’t understand that, I don’t get being so unable to determine what’s good or not that you start walking on very narrow rails and handing over accountability to some higher power or some old book or scrolls written by other people who are equally clueless. I’m not saying it makes someone “bad” to become spiritual or religious or finding God or something, I’m just saying it’s completely alien to me, I cannot fathom making the series of choices to get to that point.
I find that our capability to think about our actions, our impact on others, our choices and decisions from within, our capacity to reframe and understand our choices, that’s about the only spark of free-will that may be real. It’s a kind of suicide to hand over that one, tiny thing we actually have.